Posted by Trisha on August 06, 2013

Today's Debut of the Day pick is The Spellman Files, the 2007 debut of Lisa Lutz, a former screenwriter. Wacky and irreverent, this is a quirky first novel that will appeal to fans of "Arrested Development" and the works of Maria Semple.

The first in a series, The Spellman Files tells the story of Isabelle Spellman, a tough-talking 28-year-old (described by another character as "Dirty Harry meets Nancy Drew") who works for her eccentric family's P.I. business. Investigating others is their formal objective, but the family including alcoholic gambler Uncle Ray and Izzy's 14-year-old sister Rae (who is known to snap incriminating photos of family members to use as blackmail) regularly probe each other's lives as well. This comes to a head when Izzy starts dating nice-guy dentist Daniel and can't go on a date without turning around to find her mother hot on her tail.

Posted by Trisha on August 06, 2013

As the writers of the 2013 debuts we've been highlighting this month know, launching a first novel is an uncertain thing. Which signal the beginnings of a successful career? Which are flashes in the pan? It's often hard to tell.

With these 25 debuts, however, there was no doubt. These authors astonished right out of the gate with strong storytelling prowess and memorable voices. Read on for our list of the best debuts from the century's first decade: 2000-2009.

Perhaps the defining debut of the 2000s, Smith's multicultural portrait of London life perfectly captured The Way We Live Now. While totally specific in its jump-off-the-page characters and true-to-life setting, it manages to have a universal feel as well—this could be your family. This is the sort of ambitious, accomplished debut that it's impossible to ignore, and Smith has gone on to prove her talent with three more very different but equally accomplished novels.

"This best-selling novel is the work of a whiz-kid," says our review—which about sums things up. Imaginative, quirky and humorous, the novel also tackles the Jewish diaspora and the effect of the past on the present, ideas that Foer continued to explore in his second bestseller, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Though she's now one of the leading voices in historical fiction, back in 2001 Brooks was best known for her prize-winning work as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. She broke through the fiction barrier with a bang to tell this story of a small English village that goes into quarantine when the black plague is discovered within its boundaries.

Prize-winning poet Jiles takes on a little-known slice of American history: the imprisonment of women during the Civil War. After being unjustly accused of spying, 18-year-old Adair is taken from her family home in the Ozarks to the St. Louis jail. With the help of a sympathetic Union soldier—who promises to find her once his duty is over—she manages to escape and embarks on a harrowing trek home. Jiles excels at depicting the horrors of a land and people ravaged by war, and her strong and spirited heroine is one readers will root for.

An old-fashioned family drama, Glass' fiction debut is told in three parts, a triptych that gives a full picture of the complicated bonds within the McLeod family—parents Paul and Maureen, their oldest son Fenno and their twin sons David and Dennis. Brilliantly rendered, full of characters who feel like people you know, this is a polished, perfect first book.

The brutal, violent death suffered by Sebold's narrator in the opening chapter sets the tone for this bold and visceral first novel. Susie Salmon is just 14 when she goes missing on the way home from school. Though her own life is over, she continues to watch the struggles of her family from heaven as they attempt to discover what happened to their beloved little girl.

Jones' debut is a sensitively written coming-of-age story, set against the backdrop of Atlanta's African-American neighborhoods in 1979, where black children were being murdered by an infamous serial killer. This historical drama serves to deepen Jones' careful exploration of the dangers of growing up—and especially, the dangers of growing up black.

In her first novel, Lahiri continued to showcase the elegant, deceptively simple writing that marked her Pulitzer Prize-winning story collection, expanding her scope to tell the story of Gogol Ganguli, the American-born son of Ashoke Ganguli, who arrives in Massachusetts from India in the late 1960s as an engineering student, and Ashima, Ashoke's wife through an arranged marriage.

Hosseini was a practicing physician in California when he wrote The Kite Runner, a surprise hit that illuminated Afghanistan’s tortured history through the powerful story of two boys. The novel sold more than 10 million copies in the U.S., and Hosseini has since published two otherbestsellers.

This "staggeringly accomplished" first novel takes as its premise a surprising piece of history: Some free blacks did, in fact, own slaves themselves. Jones takes a clear-eyed look at this morally complicated time through his complex characters, including Henry Townsend, whose own parents worked for years to buy his freedom only to see him enslave others, and Jim Skiffington, a local sheriff who is personally against slavery but must uphold the laws of 1850s Virginia.

Christopher Boone is 15, and something of an autistic savant. Yet his ability to name every prime number doesn't help him parse the emotional turmoil of his home life. When he embarks on a mission to find out who stabbed his neighbor's dog with a gardening fork, Christopher—who narrates the story in an inimitable voice—ends up stumbling on a much greater mystery.

Who would have thought that an 800-page book starring two magicians could become a major bestseller? Though Clarke's epic, Dickensian tale set in an alternate 1806 England might have come in on Harry Potter's coattails, it had a style all its own. As magicians Strange and Norrell—the first in possession of abundant natural, effortless but undirected talent, and the second something of a scholarly pedant—attempt to bring magic back to England, Clarke brings magic back to the world of literary fiction. Fans of The Night Circus and The Golem and the Jinni—you're welcome.

We readers love our books about books, and Ruiz Zafon's first adult novel—also a bestseller in his native Spain—is one of the best ever written. A twisty, Gothic tale that contains a story-within-a-story, it features a mythical "Cemetery of Forgotten Books," a reclusive author and a Barcelona that is still reeling from the Spanish Civil War. Part noir, part coming-of-age story and part mystery, this is 100% page-turner.

The somewhat staid world of Southern fiction got a jump-start when Jackson appeared on the scene. Though it targets themes of redemption, family bonds and the weight of the past, Jackson's writing deals honestly with the South's complicated past, possesses nary a jot of nostalgia and is anything but treacly. Her debut showcases all of the above and adds a saucy, strong heroine to boot.

Novels set in prep school are a dime a dozen, which makes the fact that Prep stood out from the crowd an even more impressive feat. As middle-class, Midwestern girl Lee learns to swim among the sharks at her upscale boarding school, Sittenfeld perfectly captures all the pain and drama of growing up, making for a solid, perceptive debut.

Starring a bookish young heroine who gets drawn into a Gothic mystery involving a reclusive female writer, this dark horse debut took bestseller lists by storm upon publication and has been a perennial hit with book clubs ever since. Setterfield, who taught French before becoming a published writer, is only now coming out with a follow up—we can't wait to dig in.

Voice is a big part of what marks a debut as special, and the hyper-literate, exuberant, creative voice of Marisha Pessl was one that readers could love or love to hate—but not ignore. This ambitious coming-of-age novel is also a suspenseful mystery, a story of adolescence and a touching portrayal of the father/daughter relationship. Pessl's long-awaited second novel, Night Film, is coming later this month.

Narrating a novel in the second-person plural is a risky choice—especially when it's also your first book. But Ferris pulls it off with aplomb in Then We Came to the End, a high-wire act of a novel that takes a collection of office archetypes—the go-getters, the slackers, the petty tyrants—and brings them vividly to life. Written in just 14 weeks, this vibrant and lively story marked Ferris as a true writer to watch.

The turbulent political history of South America is not often plumbed for fiction, but Alarcón does this complicated subject justice—and tells a moving tale besides—in his lyrical debut, set in an unnamed South American country. "This book is about telling the stories that people didn't want to hear before, that were inconvenient to hear," he told us in an interview. Alarcón's second novel, At Night, will be published in November.

Díaz's first novel, which had been anticipated for nearly a decade, stars an overweight nerd who couldn't be more different from Yunior, the womanizing antihero introduced in Díaz's celebrated story collection, Drown. Yet the two share a talent for falling in love, and as Díaz recounts Oscar's journey in that inimitable voice, readers fall in love as well.

Occupying the narrow territory between suspense and literary fiction, French's debut is a psychologically acute, harrowing police procedural. As Dublin detective Rob Ryan and his partner and best friend Cassie Maddox investigate a 12-year-old girl's murder, Rob finds that the case stirs up a childhood trauma he can no longer ignore.

Quirky and bold, Lauren Groff's debut is both the story of an individual—Willie Upton, who has been told that her father isn't the person she thought he was—and a town: Templeton, in upstate New York. As Willie pores over Templeton history in order to discover who her father is, readers are treated to the colorful histories of its varied residents. Told in several voices, including that of the area lake monster, this is a lively and compelling first novel.

One of the signs of a successful novel is its ability to spawn imitators—and we're still feeling the impact of Stieg Larsson's hard-boiled Swedish thriller starring a heroine who, to put it mildly, doesn't take crap from anyone. Sadly, Larsson died before seeing his novels published, but his legacy lives on in the flood of Scandinavian thrillers and kick-ass heroines that swamp bookshelves worldwide.

Through 2009, and well into 2010, I frequently had the following conversation: "I just read a really great book," a friend would say excitedly. Before she could launch into a description, I would hold up a hand. "Was it The Help?" Nine out of 10 times, the amazed friend would say yes. (I would later play this party trick in the summer of 2012 with Gone Girl.) A debut like that deserves a spot on any best list.

Like Khaled Hosseini, Verghese trained as a doctor before turning to fiction, and his first novel stars twin siblings who both practice medicine. Marion becomes an excellent if unheralded surgeon, but Shiva, with no formal medical training, becomes a pioneer in fistula repair, a skill desperately needed in Ethiopia. As this epic tale unwinds across continents, the conflicts between the two very different brothers are juxtaposed with the larger crises in the outside world.

Set in Pennsylvania, in the heart of the Rust Belt, this literary debut portrays a disappearing small-town, blue-collar America with clear-eyed perception. Best friends Isaac and Poe had planned to escape their dying hometown of Buell for college. But when these dreams are crushed, both must try to salvage their futures. Meyer, whose second novel, The Son, was published this year, writes with authority, and his work has been compared to American greats like McCarthy and Faulkner.

What was your favorite debut of the early 2000s? Tell us in the comments.

Posted by Trisha on August 05, 2013

Today’s Debut of the Day pick is Jennifer duBois' A Partial History of Lost Causes—one of our favorite books of 2012 and a personal favorite of mine. Set mainly in St. Petersburg, Russia, the story follows the converging lives of two very different characters who are trying to face their own personal lost causes with courage.

In a novel that conjures the Russian literary tradition, duBois weaves an intricate web of relationships among characters forced to confront difficult existential choices. Irina, with her “inability to invest in lost causes,” struggles with the private suffering brought on by the knowledge that her life will be truncated by disease, while Aleksander fights against what seems an equally inevitable public destiny.

Posted by Joelle on August 05, 2013

Adelle Waldman's critically lauded debut novel,The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., has sparked countless heated discussions of the titular character's, well, character. The book offers readers rare—and almost startlingly voyeuristic—insight into the mind of 30-something Brooklynite Nate as he adjusts from being a struggling freelance writer to having a six-figure book deal and as he fickly—and somewhat obliviously—navigates the urban dating scene. (For insight into the insight, check out our interview with Waldman about the book.)

We were curious about which books Waldman has enjoyed reading lately, so we asked her. Here are her recommendations:

Middlemarch By George Eliot

I recently reread Middlemarch—this time, on audiobook, read by Juliet Stevenson, who is a terrific narrator. It was, I think, the fourth time I’d read the book, and it’s a book absolutely worthy of multiple readings, especially for people who haven’t read it since college. Even if you loved it then, I guarantee you will see more in it if you read it again as an adult. For me, on this rereading, I noticed so many observations about people and social life that I wonder if I’d missed them before because I was too caught up in the story—what would happen next—or just because I was too young to realize just how smart they were.

It’s fitting that I just mentioned Middlemarch because Hershon’s novel, about two men who meet at Harvard in the 1960s and their wives and children, reads in some ways like a sweeping, character-based 19th-century novel. Hershon’s vivid characters jump off the page, and she renders their setting, and social and historical context, with great and pithy intelligence. But the novel is also a classic love story—a love triangle—that is both satisfying and unsentimental. It’s the kind of engrossing book you want to get wholly absorbed in over a vacation or long weekend.

This novel blew me away. Teddy Wayne did something remarkable—he wrote an entire book from the perspective of an 11-year-old, who happens to be a pop star—and still produced a book that is bracingly smart and funny, and yet never reads as if an adult wrote it because Jonny’s voice feels so authentic. Through Jonny, who has absorbed the values of the shallow, success-obsessed world he lives in, Wayne manages to critique not merely celebrity culture but all of us. We can’t help but be amused by some of Jonny’s most cynical observations, about, for example, how you want not only girls but pretty girls to come to concerts because the pretty ones will be brought by boyfriends (two tickets sold rather than one) and the boyfriends will buy them T-shirts to ingratiate themselves (more “merch” sold). Yet this isn’t a satirical book. Jonny is very tenderly drawn, and the novel is also a gripping, warm-hearted story about a confused young boy who is trying to find connection.

What do you think? Will you be reading The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. or any of Waldman's recommendations?

Posted by Trisha on August 02, 2013

Today’s Debut of the Day pick is A Reliable Wife, the 2009 first novel from Robert Goolrick. Set in small-town Wisconsin in the early 1900s, this Gothic, ominous story is full of dark twists and turns.

In its best moments, A Reliable Wife calls to mind the chilling tales of Poe and Stephen King, and at its core this is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions. It melds a plot drenched in suspense with expertly realized characters and psychological realism. The fate of those characters is in doubt right up to this relentless story’s intense final pages, and Goolrick’s ability to sustain that tension is a tribute to his craftsmanship and one of the true pleasures of a fine first novel.

Posted by Trisha on August 01, 2013

Today’s Debut of the Day pick is You Came Back by Christopher Coake, a wrenching journey through grief that is also a suspenseful page-turner. Is Mark Fife's son really haunting the home where he died? Can people move on after tragedy? These questions and more are answered in this thoughtful first novel.

In You Came Back, the compelling debut novel by award-winning writer Christopher Coake, there is no shortage of love. There is the love Mark Fife has for his fiancée, Allison. There is his stubborn, somewhat obsessive love for his ex-wife, Chloe, the college sweetheart who left him. And there is the mountain of love he and Chloe both shoulder for their young son, Brendan, whose death in terrifyingly mundane circumstances will send chills down the spine of every parent.

Read the full review from our March 2012 issue here. And look for a new debut of the day all month long!

Posted by Trisha on August 01, 2013

This month, BookPage.com is focusing on First Fiction! Though we can't guarantee all the mystery and mayhem of Private Eye July, we can promise plenty of that special sort of thrill that comes with discovering a distinctive new voice.

Every day in August, we'll be blogging about the best debut novels. Here's a sample of what you can expect:

A "Debut of the Day" post highlighting one of our favorite first novels from our archives